In the first scene of A Moveable Feast,Hemingway goes into a warm, clean and friendly café on the Place St Michel in Paris. When he arrives, he orders a café au lait, gets out his notebook and pencil, and begins to write. He notices a girl “with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek”. He wonders about putting her in the story he is writing, decides against and just carries on writing. In his story, some people are drinking and this prompts him to ask the waiter for some rum. As he writes, he loses himself in the story. After finishing it, he orders a dozen oysters and a carafe of white wine.

There is so much in that short description about the nature of writing and the needs of the writer. It also shows how the fictional world can be interwoven with the space in which the writer chooses to work.

For Hemingway, Paris was the ideal place to work in the 1920s. You could live cheaply; cafés served inexpensive food and drink and you could use them to escape your cold room and to watch people; and often you spoke to a friend or fellow writer who happened to appear that morning. An idealised picture perhaps, but still one that inspires me at least.

I find myself wondering if and where we can find similar conditions for writing today? London and Paris are far too expensive for most. And anyway I am not aware of cafés that writers frequent in the way they did then. I did belong to a members’ club in Soho for many years but it was cold in winter and seemed increasingly frequented by noisy lunchers.

The rhythm of a writer's day The daily routine of other writers fascinates me too. For example, how do they get started? If Hemingway couldn’t get going, he would say to himself: “All you have to do is write one true sentence,” and he would go on from there. There was always a simple sentence that he knew or had seen or had heard someone say:

“If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.”

I recognise so well the danger of weighing down your writing by starting with a long preamble. Cut it out and the remaining words are stronger and more alive.

And when is the right moment to stop writing? In another scene, Hemingway is working in a room on the top floor of a hotel in the rue Cardinale Lemoine. He always works until he has something done, and always stops when he knows what’s going to happen next. That way he can “be sure of going on the next day”.

It was also important to Hemingway not to think about what he was writing until the next day. That way his subconscious would be working on it, and at the same time he would be “listening to other people and noticing”. So he finishes the writing day by putting his notebook in the drawer of his table. And after working well, he feels free to walk anywhere in Paris.

“Space” means so much more than physical room. To write, we do need physical space, but we also need metaphorical space for thinking, and social space for talking to others. Some of us also enjoy sensuous space. The sounds I hear in my "writing space" in France are country sounds – birds, wind in the trees, church bells; what I see are old stone buildings and gardens with fig trees, roses and lavender; and when I walk down the lane towards the church, I can touch and smell the sage, thyme and rosemary growing on top of the stone wall. It’s as good as, but different from, Paris in the 1920s.